CMAJ's Century Reflects a Profession and a Country

centennial-gray_Layout 1 24/12/10 8:13 AM Page 17 CMAJ 100 Years CMAJ’s century reflects a profession and a country Charlotte Gray BA he first decade of the 20th century was frenetic, with manned flights and Model T T cars in the United States and a naval armaments race in Europe. Medical and scientific knowledge was expanding at warp speed: Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his research into digestion, Ernest Rutherford was exploring atomic structures and Paul Erhlich was develop- ing an effective drug for syphilis. And Canada? With a population of 5.3 million, the young country clung to British apron strings as it tottered toward sovereignty. Yet exhilaration swept this land too, and its growing professional class. Officers of the Canadian Medical Association, founded in Québec City, Quebec in the year of Confederation, 1867, shared the optimism. In 1911, the association took a bold step. To solidify its national and international ambitions, it established the monthly Canadian Medical Association Jour- N 2663 Collection, Foote Manitoba, of Archives At the time CMAJ began publishing, infant mortality rates were soaring to over nal, an amalgamation of the Montréal Medical 20 per cent, prompting government agencies to introduce public health educa- Journal and the Maritime Medical News. The tion programs. In this 1916 photo, a public health nurse in Winnipeg, Manitoba first issue promised to be “a medium for the uses a doll to show young women how to bathe a baby. expression of all that is best in Canadian medicine.” It was going to show the world that the country’s small cadre of some 7500 university- membership: the profession’s need for good sci- This is the first in a series of trained doctors deserved to be taken seriously. ence and a collective voice. CMAJ is a mirror of articles marking CMAJ’s 100th anniversary. From the start, the founding editor, Dr. (later both our doctors and our country. It is also a Sir) Andrew Macphail, Professor of the History periodical that has trodden a delicate line CMAJ 2011. DOI:10.1503 /cmaj.101799 of Medicine at McGill University in Montréal, between its role as house organ and the journal- set high standards for the journal and its contrib- istic impulse toward independence. utors. He championed professional autonomy. CMAJ was established at a propitious “The free play of the profession is impeded by moment in medical history: 1911 was probably unconsidered legislation.” And he wanted arti- the first year, medical historian Michael Bliss cles to be readable. “There is probably more bad reminds us, that “an ordinary person visiting a writing in medical journals than in any other doctor is said to have been more likely to be kind of periodical.” helped than harmed.” This was partly thanks to In the century that has passed since CMAJ’s medical advances, such as x-rays, and partly first issue (which consisted of 100 pages of because 1911 was also the year that there was dense print), the profession itself has grown in finally a legal requirement for physicians to strength (to more than 83 000 physicians) and apply for a licence to practise. Popular 19th- credibility. The society around it has evolved century nostrums like the widely advertised from a largely rural population with European “Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People” roots to a multicultural, multilingual, urban began to lose their lustre. country with a population of 32 million and a In the journal’s first decade, when almost all gross domestic product that is the 11th largest in clinicians were generalists, public health issues the world. But for 100 years, the same issues quickly emerged as a priority. With life have preoccupied both the journal’s 16 subse- expectancy at only 52 years, and infant mortality quent editors and the CMA’s steadily growing rates of over 20 per cent, physicians faced a All editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the Can adian Medical Association. © 2011 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors CMAJ, January 11, 2011, 183(1) 17 centennial-gray_Layout 1 24/12/10 8:13 AM Page 18 100 Years catalogue of communicable diseases — small- money expended in providing so-called working pox, polio, tuberculosis, cholera, syphilis and classes with better houses, on wider and better typhoid — for which they could offer few reme- lighted streets, would be more than recouped in a dies. Antibiotics and sophisticated technologies lessened expenditure in courts, prisons, asylums lay far in the future. and hospitals.” The CMAJ did, however, give an Macphail was a forceful character and a care- irresistible bully pulpit to some of its contributors ful reporter, whose articles had been published in who couldn’t keep a whiff of moral righteousness the Montreal Gazette and the Chicago Times. He out of their articles. In a 1911 piece entitled recognized that most of the prevalent diseases “Cocaine in Quebec,” the writer minimized the originated in contaminated water, poor nutrition, dangers of the common stimulant with the off- alcoholism and overcrowded slums. However, he hand comment that only “a few degenerate crea- left it to the CMA president to advocate public tures in the lower levels of city life employ it to policy. In the journal’s founding year, it was not alleviate their sense of misery.” the CMAJ’s editor but the CMA’s president who Events across the Atlantic were about to argued in the journal’s pages that the association unleash far more intense waves of misery. In Sep- should lobby “municipalities and the state that tember 1914, under the title “The War,” Macphail informed readers that within the 20 000-strong 1st Canadian Division assembling at Valcartier, Que- bec, was a medical corps of 50 physicians and 700 men. “It is a matter of congratulation that our profession is better prepared for the emergency than any other class in the community.” Within a few weeks, he too had secured an overseas post- ing, despite being over 50. For the next four years, CMAJ displayed its determination to be a useful resource for readers by carrying regular articles about skin grafts, treatment of nephritis and amputations, as well as poignant obituaries of association members killed in the line of duty. One of the most moving appeared in March 1918. It was almost certainly Macphail himself, a close friend of John McCrae, who described how “Jack” was beloved of patients and students. He noted sadly, “His name will live in poetry. The help to recruiting and to Victory Loans (public funding of the war effort) brought by his In Flanders Fields was enormous.” Another death, in 1919, was the occasion of a spe- cial memorial issue of the journal in January 1920. It honoured Sir William Osler, renowned as the father of modern medicine and universally acknowledged to be the most famous physician produced by Canada. Osler had also written a regular column, “Men and Books,” for CMAJ, which boosted the journal’s reputation and circulation. Following the war, doctors still grappled help- lessly with major health issues, with the influenza pandemic that had claimed 50 million lives around the world prompting a May 1920 article bemoaning the inadequacy of research on Bacil- lus influenzœ. However, the journal soon began publishing and celebrating the rapid advances of modern medicine in the first half of the 20th century. In 1922, Banting and Best (and colleagues) CMAJ wrote a “preliminary report” about their momen- In the yellowing pages of CMAJ’s first issue, tuberculosis was the “most impor- tant matter affecting the civilized world,” and the possible benefits of a new tous discovery of insulin, for which they received treatment for syphilis, “606,” were trumpeted. The complete inaugural issue is the Nobel Prize a year later. Canadian readers available on CMAJ’s 100th page at www.cmaj.ca. first learned about the use of living sutures in 18 CMAJ, January 11, 2011, 183(1) centennial-gray_Layout 1 24/12/10 8:13 AM Page 19 100 Years surgery, the first successful grafts of blood treatment of gunshot wounds to the brain and vessels and radium treatment for cancer in the anticoncussion bandeaux. Within a year, there journal’s columns. Dr. Wilder Penfield published was a whole section called “The War.” One-third on the physiology of the brain. Editors who filled of Canada’s physicians, some 3800, would even- Dr. Macphail’s shoes continued his scientific tually serve in the armed forces. CMAJ, still a rigour and his dry wit: in July 1937, a tongue-in- drab monthly publication with columns of small cheek “Ode to the Tonsils” was published. At the print, was more concerned with clinical medicine on the battlefield than with the economics of health care services at home. In 1942, a spe- “There is probably more cial bulletin was prepared for physicians serving bad writing in medical overseas. It had little impact, however: bundles of the publication were discovered at war’s end, journals than in any other neatly packaged in the CMA’s Toronto head- quarters. They had never reached Europe. kind of periodical.” The troops were barely out of uniform before the CMA, and provincial medical associations, same time, moral judgements continued to colour started work on health insurance proposals. The medical practice. In July 1930, under the title Beveridge Report in Britain, which established “Sterilization for human betterment,” one author the National Health Service, was fiercely debated urged wider use of sterilization to prevent births in Canada — nowhere more fiercely than in of “the weak, the degenerate and the generally CMAJ.

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